The Business Value of Engineered Systems

If I Had To Formulate In One Sentence What My Job And That Of My Teammates Is, I’d Say Something Like

“To show our customers the business value of Oracle’s Engineered Systems”

Because at the end of the day, customers pay real money only if there’s some real value they see in a solution.

And that is the problem most people in IT struggle with: How is what you do in IT related to your company’s total value chain?

Most of the time, people, both those working in IT and those selling and supporting into IT departments are consumed with functions and features, tech specs, standards and other tech stuff. Worse yet: Some people look at Oracle’s Engineered Systems like Exadata and Exalogic and they only see a bunch of servers in a rack, because all they know is components, servers, tech stuff.

This is dangerous terrain: Because if you can’t show the business value of your IT to your company, you’re going to be put on the list of cost centers to be squeezed, and budget cuts are never a good motivator for your job.

So what is the value of IT to the business? Or more specifically, what is the value of Engineered Systems for our customers’ businesses?

Two Kinds of Value

Essentially, there are two kinds of business values to look for when considering Engineered Systems: Saving money and making more money.

Saving money is what most people look for in IT departments. That is a historic, almost Pavlovian reaction to the question of business value, because IT budgets have been reduced for so many times due to dot com, economic or other crises.

The truth is that hardware and software are only a small fraction of total IT budget (somewhere in the 25% range depending on who you ask), while the bulk of IT spending is in implementing IT and operating it. The good news is that Engineered Systems are exactly all about helping you cut costs at exactly these biggest two factors of IT spending: Implementation and Operation.

However, IT Budgets Are Limited And Being Able To Save N% Of Them Is Even More Limited. Therefore, The Next Category Is Much More Interesting

The other source of creating business value out of Engineered Systems is by making more money. By leveraging the breakthrough performance and other innovations of Engineered Systems, new things become possible that enable new business possibilities or provide a competitive edge that others simply don’t have. Business opportunities are only limited by your market size, so this is a much more fruitful way of looking at the business value of your Engineered System.

Save money with Engineered Systems

Let’s get the easy part out of the way first. Oracle’s Engineered Systems are the ultimate standardized IT building block. Everything is integrated into a single system: Storage, servers, networking, virtualization, OS, database, middleware, applications. One building block, one point of management, one vendor, one throat to choke, one vision (insert song here).

This Results In a Number Of Cost Savings Opportunities, With Varying Amounts Of Potential Depending On How Your Particular IT Shop Is Set Up

• Time to market savings: Since everything is pre-engineered, pre-tested, pre-assembled, and delivered in one go, there’s a lot of project time to be saved with an Engineered System. No more testing, validation, evaluation, integration or other painful work to be done. How much is it worth to you if you could complete your IT project 3 months earlier?
• TCO savings: We see a lot of consolidation projects where customers consolidate databases onto Exadata or SuperCluster and middleware and apps onto Exalogic or SuperCluster. Here’s your laundry list of savings opportunities that this approach creates:
  • Power, cooling, space: Put together all of your existing database/middleware servers, then calculate their total power consumption. Multiply by a factor of 2 for cooling and HVAC, then add any costs related to space that you pay inside your datacenter. Now compare with the equivalent database/middleware power sitting in Exadata, Exalogic and/or SuperCluster. This is where raw performance of Engineered Systems translate into savings for you: More database/middleware power with less machinery, every month, every year.
  • Less cores means less licenses: The other good news of consolidation is that if you use more powerful hardware, you’ll end up using less cores for what you have to do. This directly translates into license cost savings, which can be as high or higher than any cost you save on pure hardware.
  • Less stuff to save: By using Oracle’s Advanced Compression option in the database, or (in a more data warehouse related setting) Exadata’s Hybrid Columnar Compression or the ZFS Storage Appliance’s Compression/Deduplication features, you can save a lot of Terabytes in raw disk space. And every Terabyte saved on the database side means one extra Terabyte saved on the backup side, and one Terabyte less to recover in a DR scenario!
  • Less stuff to administer: Count the number of administrators devoted to keeping your lights on in the datacenter. Subtract two. Multiply by 100k per year. That’s the cost you’ll save as a result of only needing two administrators to keep your hardware and OS running on Exadata, Exalogic or SuperCluster. Because everything on the infrastructure side is fully automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center (no link, page no longer exists) and Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control (no link, page no longer exists). Why two administrators? So one can go on vacation. Before you cry out something about killing IT jobs, let me remind you that it’s no real fun to be the guy who’s just sitting there, trying to keep stuff running between multiple vendors, endless hardware swaps, firmware incompatibilities, or installing an OS for the umpteenth time. You’ve always felt that this is just grunt-work that should be automated because you’re meant to do something more interesting. Now it is! Go and learn about how you can leverage Infiniband for faster backups to a ZFS Storage Appliance (no link, page no longer exists), how Hybrid Columnar Compression (no link, page no longer exists) can help your data warehouse environment or how you can introduce automation at a higher level into your datacenter.
  • Less stuff to test/QA/patch: Even Exadata, Exalogic, SuperCluster and other Engineered Systems have to be patched and upgraded from time to time. The good news is that there’s only one patch to apply to the whole system, and it has been already tested, quality-assured and certified for you. This means: Less work, less people and less time to test, QA and certify patches. Because this time, you don’t need to check whether the database patch works with the OS, whether the OS patch works with the FC driver, whether the SAP patch works with the database and so on. Even SAP bundle patches now come together with the Exadata patch (no link, page no longer exists) for single patch bliss. Again, this approach not only saves you time and headaches and personnel, it also reduces the risk that results out of having to qualify many components from multiple vendors together.
  • Less risk: Never underestimate the monetary effect of having less risk. A colleague of mine knows about a partner who deployed an Oracle database stack on a standard Red Hat Linux machine on some standard hardware. There was a case of driver/OS/database patch mismatch that brought them down for a long time and later on they calculated that this incident cost them more than 40k Euros. Just because some storage driver didn’t work with the OS and the database very well. This is exactly the stuff that is taken out of the equation at the engineering level, so the machine leaves the factory without this kind of problem. I’m not saying here that Engineered Systems are perfect, ’cause nothing is. But a huge chunk of potential failures has already been eliminated before your machine hits production. And that is sometimes, as some credit card company likes to say: Priceless.
• Remove Bottlenecks: Many times, the value of Engineered Systems at our clients revolves around fixing bottlenecks in their IT. Such bottlenecks can quickly become business bottlenecks and that is never fun to deal with. Case in point: Huge telco company, recently merged with another one. Overloaded the call center. Batch jobs that were designed to run overnight couldn’t complete. And as a result, call center operators didn’t have any upsell opportunities prepared for their customers (= Less incremental business) and customers started to cancel contracts due to declining service quality. Ouch. In this case, all that was needed was an Exadata environment for the data warehouse that reduced the database size by a factor of 8x and that accelerated the batch run tremendously so that all the bottlenecks could be removed. Now the call centers can work again much more efficiently and customer satisfaction plus new business due to upselling goes up.